Yesterday Nintendo officially announced the opening of the Pokémon Animation Studio at KidZania London. The Pokémon Animation Studio promises to be an interesting and unique type of attraction. According to the Pokémon Company, “The Pokémon Animation Studio is the first of its kind in Europe. The creative activity has been designed especially for kids and will last around 20 minutes. Visitors will be asked to complete a short film using stop-motion animation techniques.”
The children will be split up into pairs of one director and one producer and once paired they will be assigned their own studio booth. Each of these studio booths comes equipped with the latest stop motion imaging software and from this point the children have the rest of their session to complete the ending of their short film using the TOMY Pokémon figurines and props provided. Once they have been completed the films will be displayed on screens placed outside of the building so that the parents may admire their children’s work.
According to the developers this is intended to be “An experience like no other, KidZania London is the UK’s first educational entertainment experience. It’s a real-life introduction to the world of work, representing experiential learning at its very best. Children begin to understand and learn for themselves the diversity and function of businesses, the nature of work, and its overall contribution to well-being and prosperity in our world today.”
For those (like myself) who may not have heard of KidZania before it is a chain of theme parks or attractions for children. Each one is a unique replica of a real city, only miniaturized and designed with children in mind. In these places, children are allowed to wander around and try out different real world jobs, many of which have child-friendly replicas of the gear actually used in these positions. For doing these jobs they are ultimately paid in Kidzos, the spendable currency of KidZania. KidZania is geared towards children ages 4 to 14 and intends to let them have fun while teaching them about the working world.
